“Man’s best friend has inspired a new app – Fetch! Using your iPhone camera or photo library, it can identify and classify dogs by breeds and tell you what kind of human personality fits best with specific breeds. And just for fun, the app will even take an informed guess on what kind of dog… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Microsoft
Reminder – no more IE support for versions prior to 11
Via Microsoft for Business – “What is end of support? Beginning January 12, 2016, only the most current version of Internet Explorer available for a supported operating system will receive technical supports and security updates. Internet Explorer 11 is the last version of Internet Explorer, and will continue to receive security updates, compatibility fixes, and… Continue Reading
Organizational Restructuring and Collaborative Creativity: The Case of Microsoft and Sony
Gupta, Sonam and Dhillon, Ishneet, Organizational Restructuring and Collaborative Creativity: The Case of Microsoft and Sony (2015). The IUP Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. XII, No. 1, March 2015, pp. 53-65. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2671723 “The need for innovation and cross-dependencies among the departments is forcing organizations to restructure from divisional to functional organizational structure. This… Continue Reading
Not Even Close: The State of Computer Security (with slides) – James Mickens
“In this bleak, relentlessly morbid talk, James Mickens will describe why making computers secure is an intrinsically impossible task. He will explain why no programming language makes it easy to write secure code. He will then discuss why cloud computing is a black hole for privacy, and only useful for people who want to fill… Continue Reading
State Legislature Online Tech Landscape
A comparison of legislature and SaaS websites shows stark differences: “An analysis of 54 state legislature websites shows that the technology they utilize trails industry standards significantly. A majority, 35 (65%), are programmed in ASP.NET and running on IIS servers – both, usually paired, are Microsoft technologies. This differs greatly from standards seen in leading… Continue Reading
Big Spending by Google Facebook and Amazon on Federal Lobbying
ConsumerWatchDog: “Google trimmed its spending on lobbying in the second quarter by 13 percent to $4.62 million, according to disclosure forms filed today with the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives, but still significantly outspent other tech giants. Google spent $5.29 million on federal lobbying in the second quarter of 2014 and $5.1 million… Continue Reading
MIT – 50 Smartest Companies 2015
“This year, when the editors of MIT Technology Review began our annual search for the smartest companies, we did not have trouble finding big ideas. To make the list, a company must have truly innovative technology and a business model that is both practical and ambitious, with the result that it has set the agenda… Continue Reading
Bing to implement HTTPS summer 2015
Bing Moving to Encrypt Search Traffic by Default: “At Microsoft, we’re committed to helping users keep their data safe and secure. That’s why we support the industry’s move to use of TLS protocols as part of our effort to expand encryption across our networks and services. Bing has already been offering users the option to… Continue Reading
Information Retrieval with Verbose Queries
Information Retrieval with Verbose Queries – Manish Gupta and Michael Bendersky, March 2015. “Recently, the focus of many novel search applications shifted from short keyword queries to verbose natural language queries. Examples include question answering systems and dialogue systems, voice search on mobile devices and entity search engines like Facebook’s Graph Search or Google’s Knowledge… Continue Reading
Tech giants communicate opposition to decrypted data for law enforcement
Washington Post, Ellen Nakashima: “Tech behemoths including Apple and Google and leading cryptologists are urging President Obama to reject any government proposal that alters the security of smartphones and other communications devices so that law enforcement can view decrypted data. In a letter to be sent Tuesday and obtained by The Washington Post, a coalition… Continue Reading
Microsoft researchers publish paper on new computer vision system claimed to outperform humans
Gigaom: “Microsoft researchers claim in a recently published paper that they have developed the first computer system capable of outperforming humans on a popular benchmark. While it’s estimated that humans can classify images in the ImageNet dataset with an error rate of 5.1 percent, Microsoft’s team said its deep-learning-based system achieved an error rate of only 4.94… Continue Reading
Prying Eyes: Inside the NSA’s War on Internet Security
By SPIEGEL Staff: “…Software giant Microsoft, which acquired Skype in 2011, said in a statement: “We will not provide governments with direct or unfettered access to customer data or encryption keys.” The NSA had been monitoring Skype even before that, but since February 2011, the service has been under order from the secret US Foreign… Continue Reading
